Unless the British Government is giving out some windfall of equity this is the compensation package of a mid level software engineer at FAANG. For anyone remotely qualified for this kind of job it is an absurd pay cut. Given this budget I would suspect that the department will also be asked to hire staff at salaries that are well below market rates. In other words the position is set up to fail and a simple google search could have shown as much.
This may itself be one of the reasons why the UK never developed one of the trillion-dollar businesses that they are reportedly looking to create.
FAANG is also quite a bit harder to get into in London than in the valley, smaller offices and more picky.
I remember going to a party in west London at the time of the MPs' expenses scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary_e... - remember when this was our biggest news?) and listening to people saying things like "well it's no wonder they claim for all this stuff, you can't live in London on 60K" (roughly an MP's salary at the time).
I was just amazed by that - as a member of the shiny technological elite I thought of £60K as a pretty fat wedge. Still do really. I think here, and in Europe generally, software people are usually paid as ordinary office workers who happen to have some useful skill, not as transformative irreplaceable self-governing magicians.
Seeing that this job pays £200K actually makes me wonder for a moment if I shouldn't apply myself. I could do two or maybe three years at that salary and never have to work again.
They are probably getting a fair number of resume's from CIO's at smaller companies, or mid level people. And like all good HR departments rejecting everyone who isn't making a horizontal move.
OTOH, lets say your looking for a pay raise, would you go deal with the government or jump ship and take a title cut at a us based multinational?
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3502418-apple-hires-astrazenec...